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Automating Server Side Tracing in SQL Server

Experts from within and outside Microsoft have always said that running Profiler on a production environment is not a recommended practice, as it could degrade the performance of the server. Instead they suggest doing server side tracing via SQL Trace system stored procedures. But DBAs often questioned this by asking, what if I profile the production server, from a different PC? Well, I haven't heard a convincing answer to this whole thing about Profiler vs. server side tracing yet, but I attended SQL PASS 2003 in Seattle (between 11th and 14th of November, 2003). More than once during the event, some of the big wigs from Microsoft PSS recommended server side tracing over Profiler. Well, they definitely know their stuff, so I decided to start using server side tracing, instead of Profiler. Not to mention, I personally heard about incidents where DBAs brought down SQL Servers by running Profiler (especially in version 7.0).